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Submission + - Alexander Graham Bell: Patent Theif? (msn.com)

Submitted by
DynaSoar
DynaSoar writes: "MSNBC is carrying an AP article reviewing a book due out January 7, that claims to show definitive evidence that Bell stole the essential idea for telephony from Elisha Gray http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22400009/. Author Seth Shulman shows that Bell's notebooks contain false starts, and then after a 12 day gap during which he visited the US Patent Office, suddenly show an entirely different design, very similar to Gray's design for multiplexing Morse code signals. Shulman claims that Bell copied the design from Gray's patent application and was improperly given credit for earlier submission, with the help of a corrupt patent examiner and aggressive lawyers. Shulman also claims that fear of being found out is the reason Bell distanced himself from the company that carried his name. And if Gray Telephone doesn't seem to roll off the tongue, Shulman also noted that both of them were two decades behind the German inventor Johann Philipp Reis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philipp_Reis who produced the first working telephony system."
Caldera

Submission + - SCO Receives Nasdaq Notice Letter (cnn.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: This somewhat amusing press release of sorts tells us one of those things we've all been waiting a while for. SCO(X) has announced that: that it received a Nasdaq Staff Determination letter on December 21, 2007 indicating that as a result of having filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the Nasdaq Listing Qualifications Panel has determined to delist the company's securities from the Nasdaq Stock Market and will suspend trading of the securities effective at the open of business on Thursday, December 27, 2007. PJ at Groklaw has surmised that with effectively zero cash resources left, Novell doesn't stand to get much more than SCO's furniture, if even that. Ding dong, is the wicked witch finally dead yet?
The Courts

Submission + - FBI Forensic Evidence Discredited

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens
Hugh Pickens writes: "The Washington Post reports that the FBI has abandoned comparative bullet-lead analysis, the technique using chemistry to link crime-scene bullets to ones possessed by suspects on the theory that each batch of lead had a unique elemental makeup, after the National Academy of Sciences said that decades of FBI statements to jurors linking a particular bullet to those found in a suspect's gun or cartridge box were so overstated that such testimony should be considered "misleading under federal rules of evidence." The report added that it found that bullets packaged 15 months apart — a span that assumed separate batches of lead — had the exact composition, potentially undercutting the theory that each batch was unique and that it found that bullets in a single box often had several different lead compositions. NAS says that the flaw is in using a statistical method called chaining (pdf) in which the analyst sequentially compares crime scene bullets to a set of reference bullets assembling them into groups of compositionally indistinguishable bullets which can lead to the formation of artificially large sets of matching bullets. The government has fought releasing the list of the estimated 2,500 cases over three decades in which the FBI performed the flawed analysis."
Biotech

Submission + - Has Science Become Corrupted?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Has Science Become Corrupted?

An award winning science author, Gary Taubes has written a book that pans the medical community's treatment of the obesity epidemic. By itself, that isn't particularly worth our time. Diet books are a dime a dozen and we don't cover them on Slashdot anyway.

What is interesting is that it looks like the medical community is behaving in a very unscientific manner. Taubes points out that the current medical orthodoxy has no basis in research. In fact, all the available research points in quite another (more traditional) direction. Here is BoingBoing's take on the story. You can follow the link from there to an excellent podcast of an interview with Taubes on CBC's 'Quirks and Quarks'.

The medical community seems to defer unthinkingly to authority. For instance, when Britain's most respected paediatrician Sir Roy Meadow came up with a crackpot theory (which I thought we have covered on Slashdot but can't find) that sent innocent people to jail, the courts and the medical community bought it hook line and sinker. Of course, he isn't the only one in that boat. Pathologists all over the world have sent innocent people to jail. There's a case in Ontario, Canada right now of a pathologist who screwed up more than twenty cases and sent several people to jail.

People who study expert behavior have found that people need feedback to maintain their expertise. If they don't get the feedback by the nature of the system or because others are too intimidated/lazy to disagree with them, their behavior becomes non-expert. Ericsson points out that surgeons get better as they get older but mammographers don't. Surgeons get feedback immediately. The patient lives or dies. Mammographers may never find out if they are right or wrong.

So, has medicine become a non-science? Is it mostly a non-science? Somewhat? Can physicists feel smug with their repeatable experiments or do they have some 'splainin to do about string theory?
Space

Submission + - Incredible Holmes Comet grows bigger than the sun (networkworld.com)

Submitted by
coondoggie
coondoggie writes: "The Sun is no longer the largest object in our solar system. The recently visible-to-the-naked-eye Holmes comet has achieved that distinction today. The comet has a larger gas and dust cloud known as the coma, and consequently it has a larger diameter than the sun according to astronomers at the University of Hawaii. Scientists don't seem to have a guess as to how big it will ultimately become. The Holmes coma's diameter on Nov. 9 was 869,900 miles (1.4 million kilometers), based on measurements by Rachel Stevenson, Jan Kleyna and Pedro Lacerda of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. The sun's diameter, stated differently by various sources, is about 864,900 miles (1.392 million kilometers). http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/21947"
United States

Submission + - Diebold Voting Machines Vulnerable to Virus Attack

Submitted by
mcgrew
mcgrew writes: "PC world is reporting in the linked "printer friendly version" that

Diebold Election Systems Inc. voting machines are not secure enough to guarantee a trustworthy election, and an attacker with access to a single machine could disrupt or change the outcome of an election using viruses, according to a review of Diebold's source code.

"The software contains serious design flaws that have led directly to specific vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit to affect election outcomes," read the University of California at Berkeley report, commissioned by the California Secretary of State as part of a two-month "top-to-bottom" review of electronic voting systems certified for use in California.

The assessment of Diebold's source code revealed an attacker needs only limited access to compromise an election.
Oddly, my state of Illinois, long known for election fraud, has paper trails (at least in my county) and according to Black Box Voting doesn't use Diebold anywhere."
Space

Submission + - Newfound Planet Has Earth-Like Orbit (space.com)

Submitted by
Raver32
Raver32 writes: "The new planet, spotted using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas, circles its bloated parent star every 360 days and is located about 300 light-years away, in the constellation Perseus. The red giant star is twice as massive and about 10 times larger than the sun. Its planet is about the size of Jupiter or larger and was discovered using the so-called wobble technique, in which astronomers look for slight wiggles in a star's motion created by the gravitational tug of orbiting planets. The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun's brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in an estimated 5 billion years, our sun will be so big that it will engulf the inner planets and most likely Earth. But long before that happens, life on our planet will have perished and its seas will have boiled away."
Classic Games (Games)

Submission + - Checkers solved, unbeatable database created (nature.com)

Submitted by
tgeller
tgeller writes: "My story in Nature announced that a team of computer scientists at the University of Alberta has solved checkers. From the game's 500 billion billion positions (5 * 10^20), "Chinook" has determined which 100,000 billion (10^14) are needed for their proof, and run through all relevant decision trees. They've set up a site where you can see the proof, traverse the logic, and play their unbeatable automaton. Congratulations to Dr. Schaeffer and his crew!"

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